Local wineries make Harper's list

They’re the casseroles of the internet. Content-wise, lists, like tuna and noodle surprise, are filling fodder for websites, featuring a lot of ingredients that somehow thrown together, create something we can’t resist. Who among us fails to click when we see a headline for the “Top 10,” “The Best 8,” the 12 Can’t Miss” Whatever?

Harper’s Magazine focused their monthly List on The Best Wineries to Visit This Fall, “curated” by Peter Eastlake, Food and Wine’s Sommelier of the Year in 2013. And his Top 10 list was not your usual suspects. No big marquee destination winery estates. Some are just tasting rooms. Banshee, an upstart founded in 2009 by Noah Dorrance, Baron Ziegler, and Steve Graf in 2009, was dubbed No. 1. Known for the Pinot Noir, they market out of a tasting room on the Healdsburg Plaza opened only last year.

“I don’t know how they came up with us,” said Guinness McFadden, whose McFadden Farm in Potter Valley showed up as No. 4. “I’m totally surprised by it. I have had no contact with anybody from Harper’s and I don’t know that anybody in my family ever has either.”

McFadden, which bottles about 7,000 cases of sauvignon blanc, pinot gris and sparkling wine, is one of those under-the-radar winners that list-makers love to uncover. At the California State Fair their sparking Brut was deemed Best in the State, beating out 85 other entrants, including big names like Schramsberg, Scharffenberger and Piper Sonoma.

The farm and winery are located at the end of a “blind alley road,” said a puzzled McFadden. “You don’t drive past us. You have to have us in mind to come here.”

They do however, have a tasting room in Hopland.

The only Napa Valley winery to make the Harper’s cut was Long Meadow Ranch in St. Helena.

Most were on the Sonoma side of the mountains. No. 5 was Medlock Ames, with it’s rustic remodeled tasting room in the old Alexander Valley Store. Preston, a respected, old-school pioneer in Dry Creek, was N. 8. Also making the cut at No. 9 was Scribe, a hip new winery on historic land in Sonoma founded in 2007 by brothers Andrew and Adam Mariani. They’re already gaining loyal followers with their hands-on approach to winemaking.

Other wineries on the list were Hedges Cellars in the Columbia River Valley in Oregon, Panther Creek Cellars in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Early Mountain Vineyards in Charlottesville, Va., and Ravine’s Winery in New York’s Finger Lakes region.